A note on terminology: Halacha (Hebrew for "law") refers to the
legal portion of the Talmud and of post-Talmudic literature, a
halachist being a student and interpreter of that law. Hesed, often
translated as ?steadfast love,? is used in the scriptures to denote
the perfect devotedness that can exist between husband and wife as
well as the love of God for his people.
I AM AN ORTHODOX RABBI, and I am gay. For a long while I denied,
rejected, railed against this truth. The life story that I had
wanted - wife, kids, and a family that modeled Torah and
hesed - turned out to be an impossible fantasy. I have
begun to shape a new life story. This essay is part of that life
story and thus remains unfinished, part of a stream of
consciousness rather than a systematic treatise.
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It is hard to say how or when I came to know myself as a gay
man. In the beginning, it was just an array of bodily sensations;
sweaty palms and that excited sort of nervousness you feel around
certain people occurred without awareness. The arrival of the
hormonal hurricane left me completely dumbfounded. Just when my
body should have fulfilled social expectations, it began to
transgress them. I had no physical response to girls. But I was
physically pulled, eyes and body, toward guys. I remember my head
turning sharply once in the locker room for an athletic boy whom I
admired. At the time, I must have noticed my body's involuntary
movement, but it meant nothing to me. I understood nothing. How
could I? I had no idea what it meant to be homosexual.
Faggot or homo were words reserved for the boys
hounded for being passive, or unathletic. None of this said
anything about sexual attraction. There were no categories for this
experience, no way to explain the strange muscle spasms, the warm
sensation on my face, or the flutter in my chest. Not until years
later, after countless repetitions of such events, did it slowly,
terrifyingly, break through to my consciousness.
When other boys were becoming enraptured by girls, I found my
rapture in learning Torah. I was thrilled by the sprawling rabbinic
arguments, the imaginative plays on words, and the demand for
meaning everywhere. Negiah, the prohibition to embrace,
kiss, or even touch girls until marriage, was my saving grace. The
premarital sexual restraint of the Halacha was a perfect mask, not
only to the world but to myself.
My years in yeshiva were spectacular, in some measure because
they were so intensely fueled by a totally denied sexuality. There
were many bachurim (students) in the yeshiva whose intense
and passionate learning was energized with repressed sexual energy.
For me, the environment deflected sexual energy and generated it as
well. The male spirit and energy I felt in yeshiva was both
nourishing and frustrating. I do not know if I was alone among my
companions or not. From those early years, I remember no signs by
which I could have clearly read my gayness or anyone else's. I only
know that I was plagued with stomachaches almost every morning.
Later, on one desperate occasion, beset with an increased
awareness of my attraction to a fellow yeshiva student, I visited a
sage, Rav Eliashuv, who lives in one of the most secluded
right-wing Orthodox communities in Jerusalem. He was old and in
failing health, but still taking visitors who daily waited in an
anteroom for hours for the privilege of speaking with him for a few
minutes.
Speaking in Hebrew, I told him what, at the time, I felt was the
truth. "Master, I am attracted to both men and women. What shall I
do!" He responded, "My dear one, then you have twice the power of
love. Use it carefully." I was stunned. I sat in silence for a
moment, waiting for more. "Is that all!" I asked. He smiled and
said, "That is all. There is nothing more to say."
Rav Eliashuv's words calmed me, permitting me to forget
temporarily the awful tensions that would eventually overtake me.
His trust and support buoyed me above my fears. I thought that as a
bisexual I could have a wider and richer emotional life and perhaps
even a deeper spiritual life than is common - and still marry and
have a family. For a long while I felt a self-acceptance that
carried me confidently into rabbinical school. I began rabbinical
training with great excitement and a sense of promise. At the
center of my motivations were those powerful rabbinic traditions
that had bowled me over in my early adolescence. I wanted more than
anything else to learn and to teach Torah in its full depth and
breadth. I finished rabbinical school, still dating and carefully
avoiding any physical expression, and took my first jobs as a
rabbi. There were many failed relationships with wonderful women
who could not understand why things just didn't work out. Only
after knocking my shins countless times into the hard wood of this
truth was I able fully to acknowledge that I am gay.
It has taken a number of years to sift through the wreckage of
"my life as I wanted it" to discover "my life as it is." It has
taken more time to exorcise the self-hatred that feeds on shattered
hopes and ugly stereotypes. I am still engaged in that struggle. I
have yet to receive the new tablets, the whole ones, that will take
their place in the Ark beside the broken ones. Rav Nachman of
Bratzlav teaches that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.
It is in his spirit that I continue to try to make sense of my
life.
Although much has changed in the past few years as I have
accepted my gayness, much remains the same. I am still a rabbi, and
I am still deeply committed to God, Torah, and Israel. My religious
life had always been directed by the desire to be a servant of the
Lord. None of that has changed. The question is an old one, merely
posed anew as I strive to integrate being gay into my life. Given
that I am gay, what is it that the God of Israel wants of me!
Of course, many will hear this as an illegitimate question -
fallacious in thinking that the God of Israel can somehow accept
and move beyond my gayness. Leviticus 18:23 instructs: "Do not lie
with a male as one lies with a woman, it is an abhorrence." I do
not propose to reject this or any text. For the present, I have no
plausible halachic method of interpreting this text in a manner
that permits homosexual sex.
As a traditionalist, I hesitate to overturn cultural norms in a
flurry of revolutionary zeal. I am committed to a slower and more
cautious process of change, which must always begin internally.
Halacha, as an activity, is not designed to effect social
revolution. It is a society-building enterprIse that maintains
internal balance by reorganizing itself in response to changing
social realities. When social conditions shift, we experience the
halachic reapplication as the proper commitment to the Torah's
original purposes. That shift in social consciousness in regard to
homosexuality is a long way off.
If I have any argument, it is not to press for a resolution, but
for a deeper understanding of homosexuality. Within the living
Halacha are voices in tension, divergent strands in an imaginative
legal tradition that are brought to bear on the real lives of Jews.
In order to know how to shape a halachic response to any living
question, what is most demanded of us is a deep understanding of
the Torah and an attentive ear to the people who struggle with the
living question. Confronting new questions can often tease out of
the tradition a hiddush, a new balancing of the voices and
values that have always been there. There is no conclusive psak
halacha (halachic ruling) without the hearing of personal
testimonies, and so far gay people have not been asked to testify
to their experience.
How can halachists possibly rule responsibly on a matter so
complex and so deeply foreign, without a sustained effort at
understanding? Whatever the halachic argument will be, we will need
to know much more about homosexuality to ensure that people are
treated not merely as alien objects of a system but as persons
within it. Halachists will need to include in their deliberations
the testimony of gay people who wish to remain faithful to the
Torah. Unimagined halachic strategies, I believe, will appear under
difierent conditions We cannot know in advance the outcome of such
an investigation. Still, one wonders what the impact might be if
Orthodox rabbis had to face the questions posed by traditional
Jews, persons they respect and to whom they feel responsible, who
are gay.
There is one quasi-halachic issue I must address - that of
choice. One of the mitigating factors in halachic discourse is the
presence of free will in matters of law. A command is only
meaningful in the context of our freedom to obey or disobey. Thus
the degree of choice involved in homosexuality is central to the
shaping of a halachic response. There is indeed a certain
percentage of gay people who claim to exercise some volition in
their sexual choices. But for the vast majority of gay people,
there is no "choice" in the ordinary sense of the word. Gay
feelings are hardwired into our bodies, minds, and hearts. The
strangeness and mystery of sexuality is universal. What we share,
gay or straight, is the surprising "queerness" of all sexual
desire. The experience of heterosexuals may seem less outlandish
for its being more common, but all sexual feeling is deeply
mysterious, beyond explanation or a simple notion of choice.
The Halacha addresses activities, however, not sexual
identities; thus, in halachic Judaism there is no such thing as a
gay identity - there are only sexual impulses to control. The
tradition describes all sexual desire as yetzer ha'ra
(evil impulse), rife with chaotic and destructive possibilities.
Heterosexual desire is redeemed and integrated back into the system
through a series of prescriptions and prohibitions that channel
sexuality and limit its range of expression. Confined within
marriage, giving and receiving sexual pleasure, even in
nonprocreative ways, is raised to the level of
mitzvah.
Homosexual desire, in contrast, is not seen as redeemable and
thus remains an implacable yetzer ha'ra that needs to be
defeated rather than channeled. In this argument, gay people are
treated as people with a dangerous and destructive sexual desire
which must be repressed. The spiritual task of a gay person is to
overcome the yetzer ha'ra that prods one to have erotic
relations with members of the same sex.
The unfairness of this argument begins with the recasting of
homosexuals as heterosexuals with perverse desires. The Torah is
employed to support the idea that there is only one sexuality,
heterosexuality. God confirms heterosexual desire, giving
heterosexuals the opportunity to enjoy love and companionship. With
the impossibility of another sexuality comes the implicit
assumption that gay people can "become" straight and marry and,
indeed, should do so.
This has in fact been the ordinary state of affairs for many, if
not most, gay men and women throughout history. I know a number of
gay (or bisexual) men who have married and sustain relationships
with their wives. Of those, most have had an affair at some point
that did not end their marriage. Two gay rabbis I know were married
and are now divorced, and a third remains happily married,
surviving recurrent bouts of depression and emotional exhaustion.
What disturbs me most in this sometimes heroic attempt at
approximating the traditional ideal is the cost to the heterosexual
spouse.
While in my first rabbinical post, I decided to come out to an
older rabbi and seek his advice. He counseled me to find a woman
and marry. I asked him if I was duty-bound to tell her about my
attractions to men and my general sexual uninterest in women. He
said no. I was shocked to hear that it was all right to deceive a
woman who could very easily be damaged by such a marriage. It made
no sense to me.
Surely some heterosexual women might be willing to marry a gay
friend who could provide children and be a wonderful father.
There have been rare instances of gay women and men who have
worked out marriages where the "uninterest" was mutual. I struggled
for a number of years to find such a woman, gay or straight, with
whom to begin a family. Sometimes I still torment myself to think
that this is all possible, when it is not. I still feel ripped
apart by these feelings - wanting a woman at the Shabbat table and
a man in my bed. If I am judged for some failure, perhaps it will
be that I could not choose the Shabbat table over the bed, either
for myself or for the forlorn woman who, after dinner, wants the
comfort of a man who wants her back.
Having rejected this option, the standard Orthodox position is
to require celibacy. Many recent articles and responsa regard gay
sex as indistinguishable from adultery, incest, or bestiality. The
heterosexual is asked to limit sexuality to the marital bed, to
nonrelatives, to human beings; the homosexual is asked to live a
loveless life. I have lived portions of my adult life as a celibate
clergyman. While it can have spiritual potency for a Moses or a Ben
Azzai, who abandoned sexual life for God or Torah, it is not a
Jewish way to live. Always sleeping alone, in a cold bed, without
touch, without the daily physical interplay of lives morning and
night - this celibate scenario is life-denying and, for me, has
always led to a shrinking of spirit. What sort of Torah, what voice
of God would demand celibacy from all gay people? Such a reading of
divine intent is nothing short of cruel.
Many gay people now and in the past have been forced to purchase
social acceptance and God's love through a denial of affection and
comfort and, worse, a denial of self. Today many simply leave
Judaism behind in order to salvage a sense of dignity and to build
a life. This understanding of homosexuality leaves no sanctified
option for gay people, no possibility of keddusha or
keddushin.
I have come to understand my gayness as akin to my Jewishness:
it is integral to my sense of self. I did not choose it, but it is
mine. To try to escape it would be self-defeating. There is nothing
left to do but celebrate it. Whether in or out of the given
halachic rubric, I affirm my desire for a full life, for love, and
for sexual expression. Given that I am gay and cannot be otherwise,
and given that I do not believe that God would demand that I remain
loveless and celibate, I have chosen to seek a committed love, a
man with whom to share my life.
But so little of life is carried on in the bedroom. When I
indeed find a partner, what sort of life do we build together? What
is it that the God of Israel wants of me in regard to family and
community!
Struggling with God and with Torah as a gay person was just the
beginning. To be Jewish is to be grounded in the continuity of the
Jewish people as a witness - a holy people, a light among the
nations - a blessing to all the families of the earth. How does a
gay person help to shape the continuity of the Jewish people? The
carrying forth of the Jewish people I accomplished by marriage and
procreation. It is both a tool of the Abrahamic covenant and its
most profound meaning statement.
We are a people on the side of life - new life, more life,
fuller life. The creation story invited the rabbis to read God's
blessing of "be fruitful and multiply" as a command to have two
children, a male and a female. Every Jewish child makes the
possibility of the Torah's promise of a perfected world more real,
more attainable. Abraham and Sarah transmit this vision by having
children. Often the portrayal of blessing includes being surrounded
with many children. Childlessness is a punishment and curse in the
tradition, barrenness a calamity.
Gay life does not prevent the possibility of producing or
raising Jewish children, but it makes those options very
complicated. Being gay means that the ordinary relationship between
making love and having children is severed. This is a deep
challenge to the structure of Judaism, since its very transmission
is dependent on both relationship and reproduction. For Jews who
feel bound by mitzvot, bound by the duty to ensure that
life conquers death, the infertility of our loving is at the core
of our struggle to understand ourselves in light of the Torah.
This problem, among others, lies at the root of much of the
Jewish community's discomfort with gay people. To a people that was
nearly destroyed fifty years ago, gay love seems irresponsible.
Jews see the work of their lives in light of the shaping of a world
for their children. By contrast, gay people appear narcissistic and
self-indulgent. Gay people's sexuality is thus a diversion from the
tasks of Jewish family and the survival that it symbolizes, and is
perceived as marginal to the Jewish community because we are
shirkers of this most central and sacred of communal tasks.
This challenge also has a moral chord that strikes deep into the
problems of gay subculture. The tradition understood parenting as
one of the major moral crucibles for human development. No judge
could serve without first being a parent for fear that without the
experience of parenting, one could grasp neither human
vulnerability nor responsibility. Being heterosexual carries one
down a path that demands years of selfless loving in the rearing of
children. While not all straight couples have children, and some
gay couples adopt them, the norm is shaped less by choice and more
by biology. Yet if gay people do not ordinarily fall into
monogamous coupling and childbearing, how do we find our place in
the covenant? And what of the moral training that caring for
children provides; how do we make up for that? Is there another job
to be done that requires our service to God and to the Jewish
people? Of all the problems entailed in gay sexuality, this one
looms for me, both spiritually and emotionally.
Although there is no obvious biblical resource for this dilemma,
there are biblical writers who struggled to address God's will in
very new social circumstances. Isaiah was one such writer who
bridged the worlds before and after the Exile. Some familiar
passages have become charged for me with new meaning. In these
verses Isaiah is speaking to his ancient Israelite community and
trying to convince them that God's covenantal plan for Israel is
larger than they think. The covenant begins with Abraham and Sarah
but has become much more than a family affair. He speaks to two
obvious outsider groups in chapter 56, the b'nai
ha'nechar, the foreigners of non-Israelite birth, and the
sarisim, the eunuchs:
Let not the foreigner say,
Who has attached himself to the Lord,
"The Lord will keep me separate from His people"
And let not the eunuch say,
"I am a withered tree."
In the Talmud, a eunuch is not necessarily a castrated male, but
a male who is not going to reproduce for various reasons
(Yevamot 80b). Why does Isaiah turn his attention here to
the foreigners and the eunuchs? In the chain of the covenantal
family, the foreigner has no past and the eunuch no future. They
both seem excluded from the covenantal frame of reference. It is
this "exclusion" that the prophet addresses:
For thus said the Lord:
"As for the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
Who have chosen what I desire
And hold fast to My covenant -
I will give them, in My House
And within my walls,
A monument and a name
Better than sons or daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name
Which shall not perish."
The prophet comforts the pain of eunuchs with the claim that
there are other ways in which to observe, fulfill, and sustain the
covenant. There is something more permanent than the continuity of
children provides. In God's House, the achievement of each
individual soul has account. A name in the Bible is the path toward
the essence, the heart of being. It is passed on to progeny. But
there is another sort of a name, a name better than the one sons or
daughters provide. The covenant is carried forward by those who
live it out, in the present. Loyalty to the covenant is measured in
God's House in such a way that even if one's name is not passed on
through children an eternal name will nonetheless be etched into
the walls. Isaiah offers a place to the placeless, an alternative
service to the person who cannot be part of the family in other
ways:
As for the foreigners
Who attach themselves to the Lord,
to be His servants -
All who keep the sabbath and do not profane it,
And who hold fast to my covenant -
I will bring them to my sacred mount
And let them rejoice in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
Shall be welcome on My altar;
For My House shall be called
A House of prayer for all peoples."
Thus declares the Lord God,
Who gathers the dispersed of Israel:
"I will gather still more to those already gathered."
So inclusive is God's plan for the Israel in the world that any
foreigner can join. The notion of conversion, so obvious to us now,
was a striking innovation for the generation of Isaiah. Conversion
is about rewriting the past. Like adoption, conversion redefines
the meaning of parents and family. Birth and lineage are not
discarded. The central metaphor for Israel is still family, but
Isaiah and later tradition open up another avenue into the
covenant. Those with no future are promised a future in the House
of the Lord; those with no past are nevertheless included in
Irael's destiny. God can only require the doable. A foreigner
cannot choose a different birth, or the eunuch a different
procreative possibility. Gay people cannot be asked to be straight,
but they can be asked to "hold fast to the covenant." God will work
the story out and link the loose ends as long as we hold fast to
the covenant. Holding fast to the covenant demands that I fulfill
the mitzvot that are in my power to fulfill. I cannot
marry and bear children, but there are other ways to build a
family. Adoption and surrogacy are options. If these prove
infeasible, the tradition considers a teacher similar to a parent
in life-giving and thus frames a way that the mitzvah of
procreation can be symbolically fulfilled.
Holding fast to the covenant demands that I seek a path toward
sanctity in gay sexual life. The Torah has much to say about the
way people create keddusha in their sexual relationships.
The values of marriage, monogamy, modesty, and faithfulness that
are central to the tradition's view of holiness need to be applied
in ways that shape choices and life styles.
Holding fast to the covenant means that being gay does not free
one from the fulfillment of mitzvot. The complexities
generated by a verse in Leviticus need not unravel my commitment to
the whole of the Torah. There are myriad Jewish concerns, moral,
social, intellectual, and spiritual, that I cannot abandon. Being
gay need not overwhelm the rest of Jewish life. Single-issue
communities are political rather than religious; religious
communities tend to be comprehensive of the human condition. The
richness of Jewish living derives in part from its diversity of
attention, its fullness.
For gay Orthodox Jews, this imagination of engagement between
ourselves and the tradition is both terribly exciting and
depressing. Regretfully, the communities that embrace us, both gay
and Jewish, also reject us. The Jewish community wishes that we
remain invisible. The gay community is largely unsympathetic and
often hostile to Judaism. There are some in the gay community who
portray Judaism as the original cultural source of homophobia. More
often, the lack of sympathy toward Jewish observance derives from
the singlemindedness of gay activism. Liberation communities rarely
have room for competing loyalties.
Gay synagogues have filled a void for many, providing a place of
dignity in a Jewish community. This work is part of a movement
toward a fuller integration in the larger Jewish community for
which most gay Jews long. Gay-friendly synagogues may well point
the way, modeling a community of families and singles, young and
old, straight and gay that is in spirit much closer to my hopeful
future imagination than anything yet.
Gay Jews who wish to be part of an Orthodox community will find
very few synagogues in which there is some level of understanding
and tolerance. Some gay Jews attend Orthodox services and remain
closeted in their communities. It is crucial that Orthodox rabbis
express a loving acceptance for known gays in their synagogues even
if public legitimation is now impossible. Attacks on homosexuality
from the pulpit are particularly painful to those who have remained
connected to the traditional synagogue, despite the hardships.
I have hesitated until now to address the central halachic
concerns of homosexuality. Real dialogue is necessary before such a
process of responsa writing can begin. Still, it appears to many
Orthodox Jews that in the case of homosexuality there is little use
for dialogue in the face of such a clear biblical prohibition. A
number of my colleagues and friends want very much to respond
compassionately to gay people, but feel compelled to remain loyal
to what they see as the unambiguous word of the Torah. Let me offer
the possibility of an intermediate position to demonstrate that
real listening may indeed give birth to new halachic
strategies.
The Torah very specifically forbids anal intercourse between two
men. If the Torah expressly forbids only this one form of sexual
fulfillment, could we articulate a possible "halachic" form of gay
loving that excludes anal intercourse but permits a loving physical
and emotional relationship between two men or two women? After all,
heterosexuality is not a free zone of activity for halachically
committed Jews. For the sake of holiness, the Torah requires
heterosexual couples to refrain from intercourse during
menstruation. Why not offer such a sanctified option to gay men who
wish to find acceptance in the halachic community?
For many gay men, this will not be a realItic choice. But until
it becomes a real possibility, who knows who will agree to commit?
Of course, this challenge to gay Jewish men will be sincere only if
the halachic community then takes a lead in accepting the couples
who commit in this covenantal fashion. (Lesbian women would be
accepted without condition, because there is no Torah text that
specifically prohibits their relationships.)
I offer this framework knowing that Orthodox Jews will protest
that there are rabbinic prohibitions that invalidate it, and that
many gay Jews will feel that it too severely limits the essence of
gay lovemaking. Let it then simply demonstrate at least the
beginnings of a language of discourse between the tradition as it
now stands and the lives of gay people.
For the present, in regard to sexual behavior, I personally have
chosen to accept a certain risk and violate the Halacha as it is
presently articulated, in the hope of a subsequent, more accepting
halachic expression. I realize that this is "civil disobedience."
It is not the system itself which I challenge but its application
to an issue that has particular meaning for me and for those like
me. There is always the possibility that I am wrong. Ultimately,
the halachic risks that I take are rooted in my personal
relationship with God, Who I will face in the end. It is this faith
that makes me both confident and suspicious of myself.
I have, admittedly, a rather privatized form of community. I am
closeted and have chosen to write this essay in anonymity to
preserve what is still most precious to me: the teaching of Torah
and caring for my community of Jews. What concerns me most is
neither rejection by the Orthodox community, nor the loss of my
particular pulpit. Were I to come out, the controversy would
collapse my life, my commitments, my identity as a teacher of
Torah, into my gayness. Still, the secrecy and the shadowy exItence
of the closet are morally repugnant and emotionally draining. I
cannot remain forever in darkness. I thank God that for the time
being, the Torah still sheds ample light.
I have a small circle of friends, gay and straight, men and
women with whom I share a sense of community. We are looking for
other tradition-centered Jews who can help build a place that
embraces both the Torah and gay people. Not a synagogue, not a
building, but a place for all the dispersed who are in search of
community with Israel and communion with God. In this place, this
House of the Lord, now somewhat hypothetical and private (and soon,
I pray, to be concrete and public), those of us who have withered
in the darkness, or in the light of day have been banished, will
discover our names etched upon the walls.